Class 106 -

Ah, class 106. You sneaky devil, you. This week we were given a platform with a jointed pendulum to help us illustrate and animate overlapping actions. Basically how to animate multiple parts of a whole. For instance your arm throwing a ball. Really your entire body's involved but for my purposes we'll constrain it to the arm. Throwing a ball is shoulder, upper arm, the elbow, forearm, wrist and all the way down through the finger tips. All of these don't happen all at once, nor do they happen in their own little voids. They occur one after the other and, wait for it, overlap each other. This creates a sort of wave action which is best seen in a flac waving in the wind.

With that said, in my first attempts with my pendulum/platform Dana told me I missed one critical part of the assignment-the breaking of the joints. In other words all of the joints, while moving in the direction of the action, were moving at the same time. I needed to offset the each joint by at least one frame. Dana appreciated the creativity but said I should try and keep it basic and to what the assignment says. That's hard.

Class 106 - Pendulum Machine

I should also mention that while all of this was going on I was experimenting with rhythmic timing. Timing is a basic concept in animation that is not covered in the basic foundation class at AM. While it may seem odd to you, it shouldn't. Rhythmic/musical timing is a concept from 2d cartoons- from Popeye, Mickey and Bugs Bunny- all cartoons and animation was done to some beat. Flash forward to today's animation and you might be lucky to have this type of thought put into the animation. Not that there isn't music but that the animation isn't made with the rhythm of the music in mind. The music, prepare yourself for a bad pun, is just second fiddle, told you. Especially when it comes to animated features where soundtrack sales are the goal. So it's no wonder that AM, who trains it's students for jobs in the big studios, doesn't teach that which is not used.

In the lectures we are seemingly beaten over the head with timing being something you develop. This is true but it can also be taught. For my assignment above I had the music of one Carl Stalling, music guy for Looney Tunes, from an Avery cartoon called "Baby Bottleneck." It's a great short with Porky and Daffy. Anyway they have an assembly line and it has it's own music. The song was stuck in my head all week long and was my inspiration for the above animation. That kind of timing is a bit difficult at first but once I got the hang of it the process became a little easier. I'll be practicing it. The planning takes some getting used to.

Oh yeah and here's my revision. At the end the ball travels too far for the amount of rotation I have it do. Blub.

Class 106 - Obstacle Course Revision